“THE period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle,” wrote Shelley,1 “is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with reference to the effect which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world.” Athens dominated this period because she had won the allegiance—and the contributions—of most Aegean cities by her leadership in saving Greece; and because, when the war was over, Ionia was impoverished and Sparta was disordered by demobilization, earthquake, and insurrection, while the fleet that Themistocles had created now rivaled with the conquests of commerce its victories at Artemisium and Salamis.
Not that the war was quite over: intermittently the struggle between Greece and Persia continued from the conquest of Ionia by Cyrus to the overthrow of Darius III by Alexander. The Persians were expelled from Ionia in 479, from the Black Sea in 478, from Thrace in 475; and in 468 a Greek fleet under Cimon of Athens decisively defeated the Persians on land and sea at the mouth of the Eurymedon.I The Greek cities of Asia and the Aegean, for their protection against Persia, now (477) organized under Athenian leadership the Delian Confederacy, and contributed to a common fund in the temple of Apollo on Delos. Since Athens donated ships instead of money, it soon exercised, through its sea power, an effective control over its allies; and rapidly the Confederacy of equals was transformed into an Athenian Empire.
In this policy of imperial aggrandizement all the major statesmen of Athens—even the virtuous Aristides and later the impeccable Pericles—joined with the unscrupulous Themistocles. No other man had deserved so well of Athens as Themistocles, and no one was more resolved than he to be repaid for it. When the Greek leaders met to give first and second awards to those men who had most ably defended Greece in the war, each of them voted for himself first, and for Themistocles second. It was he who set the course of Greek history by persuading Athens that the road to supremacy lay not on land but on the sea, and not by war so much as by trade. He negotiated with Persia, and sought to end the strife between the old and the young empire in order that unimpeded commerce with Asia might bring prosperity to Athens. Under his prodding the men, even the women and children, of Athens raised a wall around the city, and another around the ports at the Piraeus and Munychia; under his lead, carried forward by Pericles, great quays, warehouses, and exchanges were erected at the Piraeus, providing every convenience for maritime trade. He knew that these policies would arouse the jealousy of Sparta, and might lead to war between the rival states; but he was stirred on by his vision of Athens’ development, and his confidence in the Athenian fleet.
His aims were as magnificent as his means were venal. He used the navy to force tribute from the Cyclades, on the ground that they had yielded too quickly to the Persians, and had lent Xerxes their troops; and he appears to have accepted bribes to let some cities off.2 For like considerations he arranged the recall of exiles, sometimes keeping the money, says Timocreon, though he had failed to obtain the recall.3 When Aristides was placed in charge of the public revenue he found that his predecessors had embezzled public funds, and not least lavishly Themistocles.4 Toward 471 the Athenians, fearing his unmoral intellect, passed a vote of ostracism upon him, and he sought a new home in Argos. Shortly thereafter the Spartans found documents apparently implicating Themistocles, in the secret correspondence of their regent Pausanias, whom they had starved to death for entering into traitorous negotiations with Persia. Happy to destroy her ablest enemy, Sparta revealed these papers to Athens, which at once sent out an order for Themistocles’ arrest. He fled to Corcyra, was denied refuge there, found brief asylum in Epirus, and thence sailed secretly to Asia, where he claimed from Xerxes’ successor some reward for restraining the Greek pursuit of the Persian fleet after Salamis. Lured by Themistocles’ promise to help him subjugate Greece,5 Artaxerxes I received him into his counsels, and assigned the revenues of several cities for his maintenance. Before Themistocles could carry out the schemes that never let him rest he died at Magnesia in 449 B.C., at the age of sixty-five, admired and disliked by all the Mediterranean world.
After the passing of Themistocles and Aristides the leadership of the democratic faction at Athens descended to Ephialtes, and that of the oligarchic or conservative faction to Cimon, son of Miltiades. Cimon had most of the virtues that Themistocles lacked, but none of the subtlety that ability must depend upon for political success. Unhappy amid the intrigues of the city, he secured command of the fleet, and consolidated the liberties of Greece by his victory at the Eurymedon. Returning to Athens in glory, he at once lost his popularity by advising a reconciliation with Sparta. He won the Assembly’s reluctant consent to lead an Athenian force to the aid of the Spartans against their revolted Helots at Ithome; but the Spartans suspected the Athenians even when bringing gifts, and so clearly distrusted Cimon’s soldiers that these returned to Athens in anger, and Cimon was disgraced. In 461 he was ostracized at the instigation of Pericles, and the oligarchic party was so demoralized by his fall that for two generations the government remained in the hands of the democrats. Four years later Pericles, repentant (or, rumor said, enamored of Cimon’s sister Elpinice), secured his recall, and Cimon died with honors in a naval campaign in Cyprus.
The leader of the democratic party at this time was a man of whom we know strangely little, and yet his activity was a turning point in the history of Athens. Ephialtes was poor but incorruptible, and did not long survive the animosities of Athenian politics. The popular faction had been strengthened by the war, for in that crisis all class divisions among freemen had for a moment been forgotten, and the saving victory at Salamis had been won not by the army—which was dominated by the aristocrats—but by the navy, which was manned by the poorer citizens and controlled by the mercantile middle class. The oligarchic party sought to maintain its privileges by making the conservative Areopagus the supreme authority in the state. Ephialtes replied by a bitter attack upon this ancient senate.II He impeached several of its members for malfeasance, had some of them put to death,7 and persuaded the Assembly to vote the almost complete abolition of the powers that the Areopagus still retained. The conservative Aristotle later approved this radical policy, on the ground that “the transfer to the commons of the judicial functions that had belonged to the Senate appears to have been an advantage, for corruption finds an easier material in a small number than in a large one.”8 But the conservatives of the time did not see the issue so calmly. Ephialtes, having been found unpurchasable, was assassinated in 461 by an agent of the oligarchy,9 and the perilous task of leading the democratic party passed down to the aristocratic Pericles.
The man who acted as commander in chief of all the physical and spiritual forces of Athens during her greatest age was born some three years before Marathon. His father, Xanthippus, had fought at Salamis, had led the Athenian fleet in the battle of Mycale, and had recaptured the Hellespont for Greece. Pericles’ mother, Agariste, was a granddaughter of the reformer Cleisthenes; on her side, therefore, he belonged to the ancient family of the Alcmaeonids. “His mother being near her time,” says Plutarch, “fancied in a dream that she was brought to bed of a lion, and a few days after was delivered of Pericles—in other respects perfectly formed, only his head was somewhat longish and out of proportion”;10 his critics were to have much fun with this very dolicocephalic head, The most famous music teacher of his time, Damon, gave him instruction in music, and Pythocleides in music and literature; he heard the lectures of Zeno the Eleatic at Athens, and became the friend and pupil of the philosopher Anaxagoras. In his development he absorbed the rapidly growing culture of his epoch, and united in his mind and policy all the threads of Athenian civilization—economic, military, literary, artistic, and philosophical. He was, so far as we know, the most complete man that Greece produced.
Seeing that the oligarchic party was out of step with the time, he attached himself early in life to the party of the demos—i.e., the free population of Athens; then, as even in Jefferson’s day in America, the word “people” carried certain proprietary reservations. He approached politics in general, and each situation in it, with careful preparation, neglecting no aspect of education, speaking seldom and briefly, and praying to the gods that he might never utter a word that was not to the point. Even the comic poets, who disliked him, spoke of him as “the Olympian,” who wielded the thunder and lightning of such eloquence as Athens had never heard before; and yet by all accounts his speech was unimpassioned, and appealed to enlightened minds. His influence was due not only to his intelligence but to his probity; he was capable of using bribery to secure state ends, but was himself “manifestly free from every kind of corruption, and superior to all considerations of money”;11 and whereas Themistocles had entered public office poor and left it rich, Pericles, we are told, added nothing to his patrimony by his political career.12 It showed the good sense of the Athenians in this generation that for almost thirty years, between 467 and 428, they elected and re-elected him, with brief intermissions, as one of their ten strategoi or commanders; and this relative permanence of office not only gave him supremacy on the military board, but enabled him to raise the position of strategos autokrator to the place of highest influence in the government. Under him Athens, while enjoying all the privileges of democracy, acquired also the advantages of aristocracy and dictatorship. The good government and cultural patronage that had adorned Athens in the age of Peisistratus were continued now with equal unity and decisiveness of direction and intelligence, but also with the full and annually renewed consent of a free citizenship. History through him illustrated again the principle that liberal reforms are most ably executed and most permanently secured by the cautious and moderate leadership of an aristocrat enjoying popular support. Greek civilization was at its best when democracy had grown sufficiently to give it variety and vigor, and aristocracy survived sufficiently to give it order and taste.
The reforms of Pericles substantially extended the authority of the people. Though the power of the heliaea had grown under Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes, the lack of payment for jury service had given the well to do a predominating influence in these courts. Pericles introduced (451) a fee of two obols (34 cents), later raised to three, for a day’s duty as juror, an amount equivalent in each case to half a day’s earnings of an average Athenian of the time.13 The notion that these modest sums weakened the fiber and corrupted the morale of Athens is hardly to be taken seriously, for by the same token every state that pays its judges or its jurymen would long since have been destroyed. Pericles seems also to have established a small remuneration for military service. He crowned this scandalous generosity by persuading the state to pay every citizen two obols annually as the price of admission to the plays and games of the official festivals; he excused himself on the ground that these performances should not be a luxury of the upper and middle classes, but should contribute to elevate the mind of the whole electorate. It must be confessed, however, that Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch—conservatives all—were agreed that these pittances injured the Athenian character.14
Continuing the work of Ephialtes, Pericles transferred to the popular courts the various judicial powers that had been possessed by the archons and magistrates, so that from this time the archonship was more of a bureaucratic or administrative office than one that carried the power of forming policies, deciding cases, or issuing commands. In 457 eligibility to the archonship, which had been confined to the wealthier classes, was extended to the third class, or zeugkai; soon thereafter, without any legal form, the lowest citizen class, the thetes, made themselves eligible to the office by romancing about their income; and the importance of the thetes in the defense of Athens persuaded the other classes to wink at the fraud.15 Moving for a moment in the opposite direction, Pericles (451) carried through the Assembly a restriction of the franchise to the legitimate offspring of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. No legal marriage was to be permitted between a citizen and a noncitizen. It was a measure aimed to discourage intermarriage with foreigners, to reduce illegitimate births, and perhaps to reserve to the jealous burghers of Athens the material rewards of citizenship and empire. Pericles himself would soon have reason to regret this exclusive legislation.
Since any form of government seems good that brings prosperity, and even the best seems bad that hinders it, Pericles, having consolidated his political position, turned to economic statesmanship. He sought to reduce the pressure of population upon the narrow resources of Attica by establishing colonies of poor Athenian citizens upon foreign soil. To give work to the idle,16 he made the state an employer on a scale unprecedented in Greece: ships were added to the fleet, arsenals were built, and a great corn exchange was erected at the Piraeus. To protect Athens effectively from siege by land, and at the same time to provide further work for the unemployed, Pericles persuaded the Assembly to supply funds for constructing eight miles of “Long Walls,” as they were to be called, connecting Athens with the Piraeus and Phalerum; the effect was to make the city and its ports one fortified enclosure, open in wartime only to the sea—on which the Athenian fleet was supreme. In the hostility with which unwalled Sparta looked upon this program of fortification the oligarchic party saw a chance to recapture political power. Its secret agents invited the Spartans to invade Attica and, with the aid of an oligarchic insurrection, to put down the democracy; in this event the oligarchs pledged themselves to level the Long Walls. The Spartans agreed, and dispatched an army which defeated the Athenians at Tanagra (457); but the oligarchs failed to make their revolution. The Spartans returned to the Peloponnesus empty-handed, dourly awaiting a better opportunity to overcome the flourishing rival that was taking from them their traditional leadership of Greece.
Pericles rejected the temptation to retaliate upon Sparta, and instead, devoted his energies now to the beautification of Athens. Hoping to make his city the cultural center of Hellas, and to rebuild the ancient shrines—which the Persians had destroyed—on a scale and with a splendor that would lift up the soul-of every citizen, he devised a plan for using all the genius of Athens’ artists, and the labor of her remaining unemployed, in a bold program for the architectural adornment of the Acropolis. “It was his desire and design,” says Plutarch, “that the undisciplined mechanic multitude . . . should not go without their share of public funds, and yet should not have these given them for sitting still and doing nothing; and to this end he brought in these vast projects of construction.”17 To finance the undertaking he proposed that the treasury accumulated by the Delian Confederacy should be removed from Delos, where it lay idle and insecure, and that such part of it as was not needed for common defense should be used to beautify what seemed to Pericles the legitimate capital of a beneficent empire.
The transference of the Delian treasury to Athens was quite acceptable to the Athenians, even to the oligarchs. But the voters were loath to spend any substantial part of the fund in adorning their city—whether through some qualm of conscience, or through a secret hope that the money might be appropriated more directly to their needs and enjoyment. The oligarchic leaders played upon this feeling so cleverly that when the matter neared a vote in the Assembly the defeat of Pericles’ plan seemed certain. Plutarch tells a delightful story of how the subtle leader turned the tide. “‘Very well,’ said Pericles; ‘let the cost of these buildings go not to your account but to mine; and let the inscription upon them stand in my name.’ When they heard him say this, whether it were out of a surprise to see the greatness of his spirit, or out of emulation of the glory of the works, they cried aloud, bidding him spend on . . . and spare no cost till all were finished.”
While the work proceeded, and Pericles’ especial protection and support were given to Pheidias, Ictinus, Mnesicles, and the other artists who labored to realize his dreams, he lent his patronage also to literature and philosophy; and whereas in the other Greek cities of this period the strife of parties consumed much of the energy of the citizens, and literature languished, in Athens the stimulus of growing wealth and democratic freedom was combined with wise and cultured leadership to produce the Golden Age. When Pericles, Aspasia, Pheidias, Anaxagoras, and Socrates attended a play by Euripides in the Theater of Dionysus, Athens could see visibly the zenith and unity of the life of Greece—statesmanship, art, science, philosophy, literature, religion, and morals living no separate career as in the pages of chroniclers, but woven into one many-colored fabric of a nation’s history.
The affections of Pericles wavered between art and philosophy, and he might have found it hard to say whether he loved Pheidias or Anaxagoras the more; perhaps he turned to Aspasia as a compromise between beauty and wisdom. For Anaxagoras he entertained, we are told, “an extraordinary esteem and admiration.”18 It was the philosopher, says Plato,19 who deepened Pericles into statesmanship; from long intercourse with Anaxagoras, Plutarch believes, Pericles derived “not merely elevation of purpose and dignity of language, raised far above the base and dishonest buffooneries of mob eloquence, but, besides this, a composure of countenance, and a serenity and calmness in all his movements, which no occurrence whilst he was speaking could disturb.” When Anaxagoras was old, and Pericles was absorbed in public affairs, the statesman for a time let the philosopher drop out of his life; but later, hearing that Anaxagoras was starving, Pericles hastened to his relief, and accepted humbly his rebuke, that “those who have occasion for a lamp supply it with oil.”20
It seems hardly credible, and yet on second thought most natural, that the stern “Olympian” should have been keenly susceptible to the charms of woman; his self-control fought against a delicate sensibility, and the toils of office must have heightened in him the normal male longing for feminine tenderness. He had been many years married when he met Aspasia. She belonged to—she was helping to create—the type of hetaira that was about to play so active a part in Athenian life: a woman rejecting the seclusion that marriage brought to the ladies of Athens, and preferring to live in unlicensed unions, even in relative promiscuity, if thereby she might enjoy the same freedom of movement and conduct as men, and participate with them in their cultural interests. We have no testimony to Aspasia’s beauty, though ancient writers speak of her “small, high-arched foot,” “her silvery voice,” and her golden hair.21 Aristophanes, an unscrupulous political enemy of Pericles, describes her as a Milesian courtesan who had established a luxurious brothel at Megara, and had now imported some of her girls into Athens; and the great comedian delicately suggests that the quarrel of Athens with Megara, which precipitated the Peloponnesian War, was brought about because Aspasia persuaded Pericles to revenge her upon Megarians who had kidnaped some of her personnel.22 But Aristophanes was not an historian, and may be trusted only where he himself is not concerned.
Arriving in Athens about 450, Aspasia opened a school of rhetoric and philosophy, and boldly encouraged the public emergence and higher education of women. Many girls of good family came to her classes, and some husbands brought their wives to study with her.23 Men also attended her lectures, among them Pericles and Socrates, and probably Anaxagoras, Euripides, Alcibiades, and Pheidias. Socrates said that he had learned from her the art of eloquence,24 and some ancient gossips would have it that the Statesman inherited her from the philosopher.25 Pericles now found it admirable that his wife had formed an affection for another man. He offered her her freedom in return for his own, and she agreed; she took a third husband,26 while Pericles brought Aspasia home. By his own law of 451 he could not make her his wife, since she was of Milesian birth; any child he might have by her would be illegitimate, and ineligible to Athenian citizenship. He seems to have loved her sincerely, even uxoriously, never leaving his home or returning to it without kissing her, and finally willing his fortune to the son that she bore him. From that time onward he forewent all social life outside his home, seldom going anywhere except to the agora or the council hall; the people of Athens began to complain of his aloofness. For her part Aspasia made his home a French Enlightenment salon, where the art and science, the literature, philosophy, and statesmanship of Athens were brought together in mutual stimulation. Socrates marveled at her eloquence, and credited her with composing the funeral oration that Pericles delivered aher the first casualties of the “Peloponnesian War.27 Aspasia became the uncrowned queen of Athens, setting fashion’s tone, and giving to the women of the city an exciting example of mental and moral freedom.
The conservatives were shocked at all this, and turned it to their purposes. They denounced Pericles for leading Greeks out to war against Greeks, as in Aegina and Samos; they accused him of squandering public funds; finally, through the mouths of irresponsible comic dramatists abusing the free speech that prevailed under his rule, they charged him with turning his home into a house of ill fame, and having relations with the wife, of his son28. Not daring to bring any of these matters to open trial, they attacked him through his friends. They indicted Pheidias for embezzling, as they alleged, some of the gold assigned to him for his chryselephantine Athena, and apparently succeeded in convicting him; they indieted Anaxagoras on the ground of irreligion, and the philosopher, on Pericles’ advice, fled into exile; they brought against Aspasia a like writ of impiety (graphe asebeias), complaining that she had shown disrespect for the gods of Greece.29 The comic poets satirized her mercilessly as a Deianeira who had ruined Pericles,III and called her, in plain Greek, a concubine; one of them, Hermippus, doubtless in turn a dishonest penny, accused her of serving as Pericles’ procuress, and of bringing freeborn women to him for his pleasure.30 At her trial, which took place before a court of fifteen hundred jurors, Pericles spoke in her defense, using all his eloquence, even to tears; and the case was dismissed. From that moment (432) Pericles began to lose his hold upon the Athenian people; and when, three years later, death came to him, he was already a broken man.
These strange indictments suffice to show how real was the limited democracy that functioned under the supposed dictatorship of Pericles. We must study this democracy carefully, for it is one of the outstanding experiments in the history of government. It is limited, first, by the fact that only a small minority of the people can read. It is limited physically by the difficulty of reaching Athens from the remoter towns of Attica. The franchise is restricted to those sons, of two free Athenian parents, who have reached the age of twenty-one; and only they and their families enjoy civil rights, or directly bear the military and fiscal burdens of the state. Within this jealously circumscribed circle of 43,000 citizens out of an Attic population of 315,000, political power, in the days of Pericles, is formally equal; each citizen enjoys and insists upon isonomia and isegoria—equal rights at law and in the Assembly. To the Athenian a citizen is a man who not only votes, but takes his turn, by lot and rote, as magistrate or judge; he must be free, ready, and able to serve the state at any time. No one who is subject to another, or who has to labor in order to live, can have the time or the capacity for these services; and therefore the manual worker seems to most Athenians unfit for citizenship, though, with human inconsistency they admit the peasant proprietor. All of the 115,000 slaves of Attica, all women, nearly all workingmen, all of the 28,500 “metics” or resident aliens,IV and consequently a great part of the trading class, are excluded from the franchise.V
The voters are not gathered into parties, but are loosely divided into followers of the oligarchic or the democratic factions according as they oppose or favor the extension of the franchise, the dominance of the Assembly, and the governmental succor of the poor at the expense of the rich. The active members of each faction are organized into clubs called hetaireiai, companionships. There are clubs of all kinds in Periclean Athens—religious clubs, kinship clubs, military clubs, workers’ clubs, actors’ clubs, political clubs, and clubs honestly devoted to eating and drinking. The strongest of all are the oligarchic clubs, whose members are sworn to mutual aid in politics and law, and are bound by a common passionate hostility to those lower enfranchised ranks that press upon the toes of the landed aristocracy and the moneyed merchant class.31 Against them stand the relatively democratic party of small businessmen, of citizens who have become wage workers, and of those who man the merchant ships and the Athenian fleet; these groups resent the luxuries and privileges of the rich, and raise up to leadership in Athens such men as Cleon the tanner, Lysicles the sheep dealer, Eucrates the tow seller, Cleophon the harp manufacturer, and Hyperbolus the lampmaker. Pericles holds them off for a generation by a subtle mixture of democracy and aristocracy; but when he dies they inherit the government and thoroughly enjoy its perquisites. From Solon to the Roman conquest this bitter conflict of oligarchs and democrats is waged with oratory, votes, ostracism, assassination, and civil war.
Every voter is of right a member of the basic governing body—the ekklesia, or Assembly; there is at this level no representative government. Since transportation is difficult over the hills of Attica, only a fraction of the eligible members ever attend any one meeting; there are rarely more than two or three thousand. Those citizens who live in Athens or at the Piraeus come by a kind of geographical determinism to dominate the Assembly; in this way the democrats gain ascendancy over the conservatives, who are for the most part scattered among the farms and estates of Attica. The Assembly meets four times a month, on important occasions in the agora, in the Theater of Dionysus, or at the Piraeus, ordinarily in a semicircular place called the Pnyx on the slope of a hill west of the Areopagus; in all these cases the members sit on benches under the open sky, and the sitting begins at dawn. Each session opens with the sacrifice of a pig to Zeus. It is usual to adjourn at once in case of a storm, earthquake, or eclipse, for these are accounted signs of divine disapproval. New legislation may be proposed only at the first session of each month, and the member who offers it is held responsible for the result of its adoption; if these are seriously evil another member may within a year of the vote invoke upon him the graphe paranomon, or writ of illegality, and have him fined, disfranchised, or put to death; this is Athens’ way of discouraging hasty legislation. By another form of the same writ a new proposal may be checked by a demand that before its enactment one of the courts shall pass upon its constitutionality—i.e., its agreement with existing law.32 Again, before considering a bill, the Assembly is required to submit it to the Council of Five Hundred for preliminary examination, very much as a bill in the American Congress, before discussion of it on the floor, is referred to a committee presumed to have especial knowledge and competence in the matter involved. The Council may not reject a proposal outright; it may only report it, with or without a recommendation.
Ordinarily the presiding officer opens the Assembly by presenting a probouleuma, or reported bill. Those who wish to speak are heard in the order of their age; but anyone may be disqualified from addressing the Assembly if it can be shown that he is not a landowner, or is not legally married, or has neglected his duties to his parents, or has offended public morals, or has evaded a military obligation, or has thrown away his shield in battle, or owes taxes or other money to the state.33 Only trained orators avail themselves of the right to speak, for the Assembly is a difficult audience. It laughs at mispronunciations, protests aloud at digressions, expresses its approval with shouts, whistling, and clapping of hands, and, if it strongly disapproves, makes such a din that the speaker is compelled to leave the bema, or rostrum.34 Each speaker is allowed a given time, whose lapse is measured by a clepsydra or water clock.35 Voting is by a show of hands unless some individual is directly and specially affected by the proposal, in which case a secret ballot is taken. The vote may confirm, amend, or override the Council’s report on a bill, and the decision of the Assembly is final. Decrees for immediate action, as distinct from laws, may be enacted more expeditiously than new legislation; but such decrees may with equal expedition be canceled, and do not enter into the body of Athenian law.
Above the Assembly in dignity, inferior to it in power, is the boule, or Council. Originally an upper house, it has by the time of Pericles been reduced in effect to a legislative committee of the ekklesia. Its members are chosen by lot and rote from the register of the citizens, fifty for each of the ten tribes; they serve for a year only, and receive, in the fourth century, five obols per day. Since each councilor is disqualified for re-election until all other eligible citizens have had a chance to serve, every citizen, in the normal course of events, sits on the boule for at least one term during his life. It meets in the bouleuterion, or council hall, south of the agora, and its ordinary sessions are public. Its functions are legislative, executive, and consultative: it examines and reformulates the bills proposed to the Assembly; it supervises the conduct and accounts of the religious and administrative officials of the city; it controls public finances, enterprises, and buildings; it issues executive decrees when action is called for and the Assembly is not in session; and, subject to later revision by the Assembly, it controls the foreign affairs of the state.
To perform these varied tasks the Council divides itself into ten prytanies, or committees, each of fifty members; and each prytany presides over the Council and the Assembly for a month of thirty-six days. Every morning the presiding prytany chooses one of its members to serve as chairman of itself and the Council for the day; this position, the highest in the state, is therefore open by lot and turn to any citizen; Athens has three hundred presidents every year. The lot determines at the last moment which prytany, and which member of it, shall preside over the Council during the month or the day; by this device the corrupt Athenians hope to reduce the corruption of justice to the lowest point attainable by human character. The acting prytany prepares the agenda, convokes the Council, and formulates the conclusions reached during the day. In this way, through Assembly, Council, and prytany, the democracy of Athens carries out its legislative functions. As for the Areopagus, its powers are in the fifth century restricted to trying cases of arson, willful violence, poisoning, or premeditated murder. Slowly the law of Greece has been changed “from status to contract,” from the whim of one man, or the edict of a narrow class, into the deliberate agreement of free citizens.
The earliest Greeks appear to have conceived of law as sacred custom, divinely sanctioned and revealed; themisVI meant to them both these customs and a goddess who (like India’s Rita or China’s Tao or Tien) embodied the moral order and harmony of the world. Law was a part of theology, and the oldest Greek laws of property were mingled with liturgical regulations in the ancient temple codes.36 Perhaps as old as such religious law were the rules established by the decrees of tribal chieftains or kings, which began as force and ended, in time, as sanctities.
The second phase of Greek legal history was the collection and co-ordination of these holy customs by lawgivers (thesmothetai) like Zaleucus, Charondas, Draco, Solon; when such men put their new codes into writing, the thesmoi, or sacred usages, became nomoi, or man-made laws.VII In these codes law freed itself from religion, and became increasingly secular; the intention of the agent entered more fully into judgment of the act; family liability was replaced by individual responsibility, and private revenge gave way to statutory punishment by the state.37
The third step in Greek legal development was the accumulative growth of a body of law. When a Periclean Greek speaks of the law of Athens he means the codes of Draco and Solon, and the measures that have been passed—and not repealed—by the Assembly or the Council. If a new law contravenes an old one, the repeal of the latter is prerequisite; but scrutiny is seldom complete, and two statutes are often found in ludicrous contradiction. In periods of exceptional legal confusion a committee of nomothetai, or law determiners, is chosen by lot from the popular courts to decide which laws shall be retained; in such cases advocates are appointed to defend the old laws against those who propose to repeal them. Under the supervision of these nomothetai the laws of Athens, phrased in simple and intelligible language, are cut upon stone slabs in the King’s Porch; and thereafter no magistrate is allowed to decide a case by an unwritten law.
Athenian law makes no distinction between a civil and a criminal code, except that it reserves murder cases for the Areopagus, and in civil suits leaves the complainant to enforce the court’s decree himself, going to his aid only if he meets with resistance.38 Murder is infrequent, for it is branded as a sacrilege as well as a crime, and the dread of feud revenge remains if the law fails to act. Under certain conditions direct retaliation is still tolerated in the fifth century; when a husband finds his mother, wife, concubine, sister, or daughter in illicit relations he is entitled to kill the male offender at once.39 Whether a killing is intentional or not it has to be expiated as a pollution of the city’s soil, and the rites of purification are painfully rigid and complex. If the victim has granted pardon before dying, no action can be brought against the killer.40 Beneath the Areopagus are three tribunals for homicide cases, according to the class and origin of the victim, and according as the act was intentional, or excusable, or not. A fourth tribunal holds court at Phreattys on the coast, and tries those who, while exiled for unpremeditated homicide, are now charged with another and premeditated murder; being polluted by the first crime, they are not allowed to touch Attic soil, and their defense is conducted from a boat near the shore.
The law of property is uncompromisingly severe. Contracts are rigorously enforced; all jurors are required to swear that they “will not vote for an abolition of private debts, or for a distribution of the lands or houses belonging to Athenians”; and every year the head archon, on taking office, has proclamation made by a herald that “what each possesses he shall remain possessor and absolute master thereof.”41 The right of bequest is still narrowly limited. Where there are male children the old religious conception of property, as bound up with a given family line and the care of ancestral spirits, demands that the estate should automatically pass to the sons; the father owns the property only in trust for the family dead, living, and to be born. Whereas in Sparta (as in England) the patrimony is indivisible and goes to the eldest son, in Athens (very much as in France) it is apportioned among the male heirs, the oldest receiving a moderately larger share than the others.42 As early as Hesiod we find the peasant limiting his family in Gallic fashion, lest his estate be ruinously divided among many sons.43 The husband’s property never descends to the widow; all that remains to her is her dowry. Wills are as complex in Pericles’ day as in our own, and are couched in much the same terms as now.44 In this as in other matters Greek legislation is the basis of that Roman law which in turn has provided the legal foundations of Western society.
Democracy reaches the judiciary last of all; and the greatest reform accomplished by Ephialtes and Pericles is the transfer of judicial powers from the Areopagus and the archons to the heliaea. The establishment of these popular courts gives to Athens what trial by jury will win for modern Europe. The heliaeaVIII is composed of six thousand dicasts, or jurors, annually drawn by lot from the register of the citizens; these six thousand are distributed into ten dicasteries, or panels, of approximately five hundred each, leaving a surplus for vacancies and emergencies. Minor and local cases are settled by thirty judges who periodically visit the demes or counties of Attica. Since no juror may serve more than a year at a time, and eligibility is determined by rotation, every citizen, in the average of chance, becomes a juror every third year. He does not have to serve, but the payment of two—later three—obols per day obtains an attendance of two or three hundred jurors for each panel. Important cases, like that of Socrates, may be tried before vast dicasteries of twelve hundred men. To reduce corruption to a minimum, the panel before which a case is to be tried is determined by lot at the last minute; and as most trials last but a day we do not hear much of bribery in the courts; even the Athenians find it difficult to bribe in a moment three hundred men.
Despite expedition, the courts of Athens, like courts the world over, are usually behind their calendar, for the Athenians itch to litigate. To cool this fever public arbitrators are chosen by lot from the roster of citizens who have reached their sixtieth year; the parties to a dispute submit their complaint and defense to one of these, again chosen by lot at the last minute; and each party pays him a small fee. If he fails to reconcile them he gives his judgment, solemnized by an oath. Either party may then appeal to the courts, but these usually refuse to hear minor cases that have not been submitted to arbitration. When a case is accepted for trial the plea is entered or sworn to, the witnesses make their depositions and swear to them, and all these statements are presented to the court in written form. They are sealed in a special box, and at a later date they are opened and examined, and judgment is given, by a panel chosen by lot. There is no public prosecutor; the government relies upon private citizens to accuse before the courts anyone guilty of serious offenses against morals, religion, or the state. Hence arises a class of “sycophants,” who make such charges a regular practice, and develop their profession into an art of blackmail; in the fourth century they earn a good living by bringing—or, better, threatening to bring—actions against rich men, believing that a popular court will be loath to acquit those who can pay substantial fines.IX The expenses of the courts are mostly covered by fines imposed upon convicted men. Plaintiffs who fail to substantiate their charges are also fined; and if they receive less than a fifth of the jurors’ votes they are subject to a lashing, or to a penalty of a thousand drachmas ($1000). Each party in a trial usually acts as his own lawyer, and has to make in person the first presentation of his case. But as the complexity of procedure rises, and litigants detect in the jurors a certain sensitivity to eloquence, the practice grows of engaging a rhetor or orator, versed in the law, to support the complaint or defense, or to prepare, in his client’s name and character, a speech that the client may read to the court. From these special rhetor-pleaders comes the lawyer. His antiquity in Greece appears from a remark in Diogenes Laertius that Bias, Wise Man of Priene, was an eloquent pleader of causes, who always reserved his talents for the just side. Some of these lawyers are attached to the courts as exegetai, or interpreters; for many of the jurors have no more legal knowledge than the parties to the case.
Evidence is ordinarily presented in writing, but the witness must appear and swear to its accuracy when the grammateus, or clerk of the court, reads it to the jurors. There is no cross-examination. Perjury is so frequent that cases are sometimes decided in the face of explicit sworn evidence. The testimony of women and minors is accepted only in murder trials; that of slaves is admitted only when drawn from them by torture; it is taken for granted that without torture they will lie. It is a barbarous aspect of Greek law, destined to be outdone in Roman prisons and Inquisition chambers, and perhaps rivaled in the secret rooms of police courts in our time. Torture, in Pericles’ day, is forbidden in the case of citizens. Many masters decline to let their slaves be used as witnesses, even when their case may depend upon such testimony; and any permanent injury done to a slave by torture must be made good by those who inflicted it.46
Penalties take the form of flogging, fines, disfranchisement, branding, confiscation, exile, and death; imprisonment is seldom used as a punishment. It is a principle of Greek law that a slave should be punished in his body, but a freeman in his property. A vase painting shows a slave hung up by his arms and legs, and mercilessly lashed.47 Fines are the usual penalty for citizens, and are assessed on a scale that opens the democracy to the charge of fattening its purse through unjust condemnations. On the other hand a convicted person and his accuser are in many cases allowed to name the fine or punishment that they think just; and the court then chooses between the suggested penalties. Murder, sacrilege, treason, and some offenses that seem minor to us are punished with both confiscation and death; but a prospective death penalty may usually be avoided before trial by voluntary exile and the abandonment of property. If the accused disdains flight, and is a citizen, death is inflicted as painlessly as possible by administering hemlock, which gradually benumbs the body from the feet upward, killing when it reaches the heart. In the case of slaves the death penalty may be effected by a brutal cudgeling.48 Sometimes the condemned, before or after death, may be hurled over a cliff into a pit called the barathron. When a sentence of death is laid upon a murderer it is carried out by the public executioner in the presence of the relatives of the victim, as a concession to the old custom and spirit of revenge.
The Athenian code is not as enlightened as we might expect, and advances only moderately upon Hammurabi’s. Its basic defect is the limitation of legal rights to freemen constituting hardly a seventh of the population. Even free women and children are excluded from the proud isonomia of the citizens; metics, foreigners, and slaves can bring suit only through a patron citizen. Sycophantic blackmail, frequent torture of slaves, capital punishment for minor offenses, personal abuse in forensic debate, the diffusion and weakening of judicial responsibility, the susceptibility of jurors to oratorical displays, their inability to temper present passions with a knowledge of the past or a wise calculation of the future—these are black marks against a system of law envied throughout Greece for its comparative mildness and integrity, and sufficiently dependable and practical to give to Athenian life and property that orderly protection which is so necessary for economic activity and moral growth. One test of Athenian law is the reverence that nearly every citizen feels for it: the law is for him the very soul of his city, the essence of its beneficence and strength. The best judgment of the Athenian code is the readiness with which other Greek states adopt a large part of it. “Everyone would admit,” says Isocrates, “that our laws have been the source of very many and very great benefits to the life of humanity.”49 Here for the first time in history is a government of laws and not of men.
Athenian law prevails throughout the Athenian Empire of two million souls while that Empire endures; but for the rest Greece never achieves a common system of jurisprudence. International law makes as sorry a picture in fifth-century Athens as in the world today. Nevertheless external trade requires some legal code, and commercial treaties (symbola) are described by Demosthenes as so numerous in his time that the laws governing commercial disputes “are everywhere identical.”50 These treatises establish consular representation, guarantee the execution of contracts, and make the judgments given in one signatory nation valid in the others.51 This, however, does not put an end to piracy, which breaks out whenever the dominant fleet is weakened, or relaxes its watchfulness. Eternal vigilance is the price of order as well as of liberty; and lawlessness stalks like a wolf about every settled realm, seeking some point of weakness which may give it entry. The right of a city to lead foraging expeditions upon the persons and property of other cities is accepted by some Greek states so long as no treaty specifically forbids it.52 Religion succeeds in making temples inviolable unless used as military bases; it protects heralds and pilgrims to Panhellenic festivals; it requires a formal declaration of war before hostilities, and the granting of a truce, when asked, for the return and burial of the dead in battle. Poisoned weapons are avoided by general custom, and prisoners are usually exchanged or ransomed at the recognized tariff of two minas—later one mina ($100)—each;53 otherwise war is nearly as brutal among the Greeks as in modern Christendom. Treaties are numerous, and are solemnized with pious oaths; but they are almost always broken. Alliances are frequent, and sometimes generate lasting leagues, like the Delphic Amphictyony in the sixth century and the Achaean and Aetolian Leagues in the third. Occasionally two cities exchange the courtesy of isopoliteia, by which each gives to the other’s freemen the rights of citizenship. International arbitration may be arranged, but the decisions arrived at in such cases are as often as not rejected or ignored. Towards foreigners the Greek feels no moral obligation, and no legal one except by treaty; they are barbaroiX—not quite “barbarians,” but outsiders—aliens speaking outlandish tongues. Only in the Stoic philosophers of the cosmopolitan Hellenistic era will Greece rise to the conception of a moral code embracing all mankind.
As early as 487, perhaps earlier, the method of election in the choice of archons is replaced by lot; some way must be found to keep the rich from buying, or the knaves from smiling, their way into office. To render the selection less than wholly accidental, all those upon whom the lot falls are subjected, before taking up their duties, to a rigorous dokimasia, or character examination, conducted by the Council or the courts. The candidate must show Athenian parentage on both sides, freedom from physical defect and scandal, the pious honoring of his ancestors, the performance of his military assignments, and the full payment of his taxes; his whole life is on this occasion exposed to challenge by any citizen, and the prospect of such a scrutiny presumably frightens the most worthless from the sortition. If he passes this test the archon swears an oath that he will properly perform the obligations of his office, and will dedicate to the gods a golden statue of life-size if he should accept presents or bribes.54 The fact that chance is allowed to play so large a part in the naming of the nine archons suggests the diminution which the office has suffered since Solon’s day; its functions are now in the nature of administrative routine. The archon basileus, whose name preserves the empty title of king, has become merely the chief religious official of the city. Nine times yearly the archon is required to obtain a vote of confidence from the Assembly; his actions and judgments may be appealed to the boule or the heliaea; and any citizen may indict him for malfeasance. At the end of his term all his official acts, accounts, and documents are reviewed by a board of logistai responsible to the Council; and severe penalties, even death, may avenge serious misconduct. If the archon escapes these democratic dragons he becomes, at the end of his year of office, a member of the Areopagus; but this, in the fifth century, is a well-nigh empty honor, since that body has lost nearly all its powers.
The archons are but one of many committees which, under the direction and scrutiny of the Assembly, the Council, and the courts, administer the affairs of the city. Aristotle names twenty-five such groups, and estimates the number of municipal officials at seven hundred. Nearly all of these are chosen annually by lot; and since no man may be a member of the same committee twice, every citizen may expect to be a city dignitary for at least one year of his life. Athens does not believe in government by experts.
More importance is attached to military than to civil office. The ten strategoi, or commanders, though they too are appointed for a year only, and are at all times subject to examination and recall, are chosen not by lot but by open election in the Assembly. Here ability, not popularity, is the road to preferment; and the ekklesia of the fourth century shows its good sense by choosing Phocion general forty-five times, despite the fact that he is the most unpopular man in Athens and makes no secret of his scorn for the crowd. The functions of the strategoi expand with the growth of international relations, so that in the later fifth century they not only manage the army and the navy, but conduct negotiations with foreign states, and control the revenues and expenditures of the city. The commander in chief, or strategos autokrator, is therefore the most powerful man in the government; and since he may be re-elected year after year, he can give to the state a continuity of purpose which its constitution might otherwise render impossible. Through this office Pericles makes Athens for a generation a democratic monarchy, so that Thucydides can say of the Athenian polity that though it is a democracy in name it is really government by the greatest of the citizens.
The army is identical with the electorate; every citizen must serve, and is subject, until the age of sixty, to conscription in any war. But Athenian life is not militarized; after a period of youthful training there is little of martial drill, no strutting of uniforms, no interference of soldiery with the civilian population. In active service the army consists of light-armed infantry, chiefly the poorer citizens, carrying slings or spears; the heavy-armed infantry, or hoplites, those prosperous citizens who can afford armor, shield, and javelin; and the cavalry of rich men, clad in armor and helmet, and equipped with lance and sword. The Greeks excel the Asiatics in military discipline, and perhaps owe their achievements to a striking combination of loyal obedience on the battlefield with vigorous independence in civil affairs. Nevertheless there is no science of war among them, no definite principles of tactics on strategy, before Epaminondas and Philip. Cities are usually walled, and defense is—among the Greeks as among ourselves—more effective than offense; otherwise man might have no civilization to record. Siege armies bring up great beams suspended by chains, and, drawing the beams back, drive them forward against the wall; this is as far as siege machinery develops before Archimedes. As for the navy, it is kept up by choosing, each year, four hundred trierarchs, rich men whose privilege it is to recruit a crew, equip a trireme with materials supplied by the state, pay for its building and launching, and keep it in repair; in this way Athens supports in peacetime a fleet of some sixty ships.55
The maintenance of the army and the navy constitutes the chief expenditure of the state. Revenues come from traffic tolls, harbor dues, a two per cent tariff on imports and exports, a twelve-drachma annual poll tax on metics, a half-drachma tax on freedmen and slaves, a tax on prostitutes, a sales tax, licenses, fines, confiscations, and the imperial tribute. The tax on farm produce, which financed Athens under Peisistratus, is abandoned by the democracy as derogatory to the dignity of agriculture. Most taxes are farmed out to publicans, who collect them for the state and pocket a share as their profit. Considerable income is derived from state ownership of mineral resources. In emergencies the city resorts to a capital levy, the rate rising with the amount of property owned; by this method, for example, the Athenians in 428 raise two hundred talents ($1,200,000) for the siege of Mytilene. Rich men are also invited to undertake certain leiturgiai, i.e., public services, such as equipping embassies, fitting out ships for the fleet, or paying for plays, musical contests, and games. These “liturgies” are voluntarily undertaken by some of the wealthy, and are forced by public opinion upon others. To add to the discomfort of the well to do, any citizen assigned to a liturgy may compel any other to take it from him, or exchange fortunes with him, if he can prove the other to be richer than himself. As the democratic faction grows in power it finds ever more numerous occasions and reasons for using this device; and in return the financiers, merchants, manufacturers, and landed proprietors of Attica study the arts of concealment and obstruction, and meditate revolution.
Excluding such gifts and levies, the total internal revenue of Athens in the time of Pericles amounts to some four hundred talents ($2,400,000) a year; to which is added six hundred talents of contributions from subjects and allies. This income is spent without any budget, or advance estimate and allocation of funds. Under Pericles’ thrifty management, and despite his unprecedented expenditures, the treasury shows a growing surplus, which in 440 stands at 9700 talents ($58,200,000); a pretty sum for any city in any age, and quite extraordinary in Greece, where few states—in the Peloponnesus none—have any surplus at all.56 In cities that have such a reserve it is deposited, usually, in the temple of the city’s god—at Athens, after 434, in the Parthenon. The state claims the right to use not only this surplus, but, as well, the gold in the statues which it raises to its god; in the case of Pheidias’ Athene Parthenos this amounts to forty talents ($240,000), and is so affixed as to be removable.57 In the temple the city keeps also its “theoric fund,” from which it makes the payments annually due the citizens for attendance at the sacred plays and games.
Such is Athenian democracy—the narrowest and fullest in history: narrowest in the number of those who share its privileges, fullest in the directness and equality with which all the citizens control legislation, and administer public affairs. The faults of the system will appear vividly as its history unfolds; indeed, they are already noised about in Aristophanes. The irresponsibility of an Assembly that may without check of precedent or revision vote its momentary passion on one day, and on the next day its passionate regret, punishing then not itself but those who have misled it; the limitation of legislative authority to those who can attend the ekklesia; the encouragement of demagogues and the wasteful ostracism of able men; the filling of offices by lot and rotation, changing the personnel yearly and creating a chaos of government; the disorderliness of faction perpetually disturbing the guidance and administration of the state—these are vital defects, for which Athens will pay the full penalty to Sparta, Philip, Alexander, and Rome.
But every government is imperfect, irksome, and mortal; we have no reason to believe that monarchy or aristocracy would govern Athens better, or longer preserve it; and perhaps only this chaotic democracy can release the energy that will lift Athens to one of the peaks of history. Never before or since has political life, within the circle of citizenship, been so intense or so creative. This corrupt and incompetent democracy is at least a school: the voter in the Assembly listens to the cleverest men in Athens, the juror in the courts has his wits sharpened by the taking and sifting of evidence, the holder of office is molded by executive responsibility and experience into a deeper maturity of understanding and judgment; “the city,” says Simonides, “is the teacher of the man.”58 For these reasons, it may be, the Athenians can appreciate, and thereby call into existence, Aeschylus and Euripides, Socrates and Plato; the audience at the theater has been formed in the Assembly and the courts, and is ready to receive the best. This aristocratic democracy is no laissez-faire state, no mere watchman of property and order; it finances the Greek drama, and builds the Parthenon; it makes itself responsible for the welfare and development of its people, and opens up to them the opportunity ou monon tou zen, alla tou eu zen—“not only to live, but to live well.” History can afford to forgive it all its sins.
I A river in Pamphylia, in southern Asia Minor.
II Grote’s statement, written about 1850, of the case against the Areopagus recalls certain criticisms of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1937. “The Areopagus, standing alone in the enjoyment of a life-tenure, appears to have exercised an undefined and extensive control which long continuance had gradually consecrated. It was invested with a kind of religious respect. . . . The Areopagus also exercised a supervision over the public assembly, taking care that none of the proceedings . . . should be such as to infringe the established laws of the country. These were powers immense, undefined, not derived from any formal grant of the people.”6
III Deianira, wife of Heracles, caused his death by presenting him with a poisoned robe. Cf. Sophocles’ Trachinian Women.
IV The Greek word, metoikoi, means “sharing the home.”
V The figures are from Gomme, A. W., The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C., pp. 21, 26, 47. They are frankly conjectural. The total figure includes the wives and minor children of the citizens.
VI I.e., what is laid down, from ti-themi, I place; cf. our doom in its early sense of law, and the Russian duma.
VII In Periclean Athens the name thesmothetai was given to the six minor archons who recorded, interpreted, and enforced the laws; in Aristotle’s day they presided over the popular courts.
VIII Strictly, heliaea is the name of the place where the courts met, and was so called (from helios, sun) because the sessions were held in the open air.
IX Crito, rich friend of Socrates, complained that it was difficult for one who wished to mind his own business to live at Athens. “For at this very time,” he said, “there are people bringing actions against me, not because they have suffered any wrongs from me, but because they think that I would rather pay them a sum of money than have the trouble of law proceedings.”45
X The word is cousin to the Sanskrit barbara and the Latin balbus, both of which mean stammering; cf. our babble. The Greeks implied by barbaros rather strangeness of speech than lack of civilization, and used barbarismos precisely as we, following them, use barbarism-to mean an alien or quasi-alien distortion of a nation’s idiom.